Dude, where’s my sports card?

“Dude, you should have seen that touchdown!” “Man, that slam-dunk was dope!”

Do we care?

American sport is by no means my wheelhouse, and I certainly don’t want to come across as a ‘Monday morning quarterback,’ but is there really a place for these inherited sports at our institution?

The Longhorns in action

Lacrosse and American Football especially seem to have thrived among the student population here, but why? How many people know what a quarterback actually does, and how many would know what to do when presented with a crosse or a baseball mitt?

University of Leicester Lacrosse team

Walking around campus and the university sports centre I took the liberty of asking a number of fellow students what they thought on the matter. Maths student Benji stated that he gets frustrated with the length of American sports matches, suggesting that the number of breaks for adverts and entertainment make them “a bore to watch.”

Francis, a modern languages student found in the gym, echoed my own sentiment when he exclaimed “I just don’t understand the rules of American football, and to be honest I barely even know what lacrosse is.”

I’m not encouraging a ‘blitz’ against these sports, and just to throw in a curve ball I quite enjoy a late night viewing of the NBA or NHL, well…the highlights, but are we really expecting them to catch on in our universities, amidst a culture of pride in our own sporting history? Are the Longhorns expecting to develop a mass following of subway alumni? Because they won’t.

We don’t do university sport here like our friends across the pond, even our most cherished national sports fail to attract capacity crowds. Besides, here we like our sports to be sports, rather than entertainment shows. This atmosphere doesn’t suit sports like American football and basketball, which have developed and grown out of the established collegiate system which draws in thousands of spectators who put their lives on hold to cheer on their local college team.

So is there room for them here? Does our university cater for the fake American nationalism that comes with them? Nobody wants to see a ‘jock’ culture emerge on campus, surely?